It's time for the 59 jurisdictions that comprise Cuyahoga County to commit to a new principle of government: Thomas Bier

Here's a real irony: Success of the new plan formed by Cuyahoga County officials to spark job growth will result in population decline and a weakened tax base.

The better the job market, the more people move. And since Cuyahoga County loses more movers to neighboring counties than it gains, its tax base weakens.

The county plan -- to boost economic development through strategic investments -- is sorely needed but does not affect the principal issue: the Catch-22 defect in our home-rule system of government.

The Catch-22 is this: Old places need substantial tax revenues to drive renewal but their tax bases are inadequate or weak because of lack of renewal. (And you know what happens when raising taxes is broached.) When the public sector doesn't do its part, private money goes elsewhere, guaranteeing decline.

The solution: Bypass the Catch-22.

Since most old places, on their own, cannot save themselves (as home rule implies they should), they need partners, policies and plans that make maintenance and renewal a dominant priority for the county. (And region. The more renewal occurs across the region, the more attractive it will be as a place to live, run a business, invest.)

It's time for the 59 jurisdictions that comprise Cuyahoga County to rise above home rule in spirit and practice and commit to a new principle of government: "We share responsibility for the maintenance and renewal of each other."

The vehicles for that are the Cuyahoga County Mayors and City Managers Association and the new Cuyahoga County Council.

Adopting that principle would not mean relinquishing home rule. It would mean determining how to aid and support each other, including how to jointly finance needed investments.

That's a hefty pill to swallow in these times, and much more challenging than restructuring county government (which will be a classic example of rearranging deck chairs on a sinking ship if the 59 continue to be entrapped by "it's your problem, you fix it").

Hefty, yes, but it would be a momentous breakthrough, an end to the scourge of seemingly inexorable community decline.

There are two initiatives under way that can shift the situation in the right direction. Cuyahoga County leaders should be engaged in both.

One is the Regional Prosperity Initiative launched several years ago by the Northeast Ohio Mayors and City Managers Association.

The RPI is advocating for state legislation that would enable jurisdictions to join in tax-base growth sharing, which is essential for financing renewal. Without collaborative financing, there will be little renewal and much decay.

The RPI also is calling for regionwide, coordinated land-use planning. Planning is key as it affects the location of real estate investment, which in turn shapes the options people (and employers) have when they consider moving.

The second initiative, by the Northeast Ohio Sustainable Communities Consortium, focuses squarely on planning. It is a three-year federally funded project involving all the key planning bodies in the 12-county region, with the goal of producing a "regional policy plan that encourages land use patterns and promotes economic development strategies that address regionwide economic prosperity."

Growth of new communities while old ones are abandoned is about as far from regionwide economic prosperity as we can get.

The consortium's policy plan must address the reality that we cannot have both scant renewal in Cuyahoga County and unbridled development in neighboring counties and expect the residential core of Cuyahoga to do anything but progressively collapse.

This situation is not exclusive to Cuyahoga County. Old places across the region -- from Lorain to Akron to Willowick -- are caught in the same quagmire of "it's your problem, you fix it."

Let's change that paradigm.

It's our problem. We'll fix it.

Thomas Bier is a senior fellow at the Maxine Goodman Levin College of Urban Affairs at Cleveland State University.

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